Tag Archives: germany

The Leipzig Zoo has a new animal who will be exhibited starting in July. However, they released a photo of her (along with other new additions), and she has already become famous in Germany and has a song about her on YouTube.

Stefan Langner, a composer and musician in a wedding and party band called “90 Degrees,” was immediately inspired. “We saw Heidi on TV, and we were so charmed, that we had to write a song about it,” Langner said. Langner collaborated with fellow band member Gitta Lüdicke in writing the song, which he says was completed in two days.

They then found three young girls, ages 4, 8, and 13, who had experience singing in a local youth club in the Harz Mountains, to record the piece, named “Opossum Heidi Schielt,” or “Opossum Heidi Peers.”

“When we asked their parents if they would be interested [in making the recording] they were very excited,” Langner, 51, said.

The girls, at times their voices altered and sounding like German “Chipettes,” sing: “Heidi is so sweet. How nice that she exists. I fell so in love with her from the first.”

Wars are expensive, and lost wars are very expensive. On October 3, Germany will finally have paid off all its reparations for World War I. Naturally, it’s complicated why it’s taken this long, and of course, the delay has mostly to do with the Great Depression and World War II.

In 1953, West Germany started paying again, and it paid off the principle of its reparations in 1983, leaving a whole lot of interest. Germany was excused from paying the interest until reunification. And so now, 20 years after reunification, they’re done with World War I.

All of which made me curious about World War II. I haven’t been able to find anything that says definitively whether Germany is still paying principle or interest for WWII, but this Wikipedia article makes it sound like there aren’t any lingering payments to be made. In fact, most of the WWII reparations weren’t taken in money, but by dismantling and re-appropriating Germany’s military-industrial complex. In particular, the US took “intellectual reparations” by claiming all kinds of German technology and patents. (Which was also to keep it from Russia.)